Saturday, October 01, 2011

Delicious was "rescued" by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen,
from the "neglect" it had been suffering under Yahoo.

Sometimes, the best "action" is no action at all.

Now, the "new" web site is up and running, and it has too many problems to count.
It is a complete re-write, and not backward compatible, and not all data are transferred...
There is a lot of "lessons" that could be learned from this obvious "disaster",
an simple summary is:

Evolution is much better than REvolution.

Changes need to gradual, in particular when a service is in use for a long time, as delicious.com was. Just ask Chinese government :)

Another important element: original creator of Delicious is not involved in this new site,
he is now working for Google... So whatever comes from the changes
will likely be very different, and indications are not better...

As an active user of delicious, I now regret for not moving to some more stable service sooner,
or implementing similar simple service for myself, as I was using before delicious.com...

Time to look at delicious's (new) REST API
A good thing: it appears to be working...

The way it is used is very simple: install a software tool on multiple computers, using a "code" generated on first installation, to put computers in a "group".
Now, a mouse can "move" from one computer to another
same as it can move from one monitor to another on the same computer.
And when you "click" on another computer, the keyboard get assigned to that computer!
Pure (software) "magic".

...you can control up to four computers from a single mouse and keyboard with no extra hardware needed – it’s all software magic, developed by Truong Do who by day is a developed for Microsoft Dynamics. The software is easy to setup and in addition to enabling drag and drop of files, you can lock or log in to all PCs from one PC...